11.10.2016
Discipleship Lies at the Heart of Christian Life – Archbishop’s Address at Dublin and Glendalough Synod 2016
Members of Dublin and Glendalough Diocesan Synods are gathering this evening (Tuesday October 11) in Temple Carrig School. Proceedings began with a celebration of Holy Communion.
This year as part of the celebrations of the 800th anniversary of the unification of the dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough, Synod members are joined by the Anglican bishops of Spain and Lusitania. The United Dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough contributed to the foundation of these two dioceses.
During the service, Archbishop Michael Jackson, delivered his presidential address in which he focused on the discipleship which lies at the heart of Christian life, service, leadership and ministry. He highlighted three initiatives being undertaken in the dioceses which seek to energise people for discipleship: Come&C, the Jerusalem Link and the Dublin & Glendalough 800 anniversary. He said the projects “are now part of the weave of diocesan life and for those who have not yet engaged directly with them, the invitation remains open. There are plenty of fresh opportunities in the weeks and years ahead”.
The Archbishop said that Christianity is a simple response to a simple invitation to be rooted in Jesus Christ. It comes in the Bible in at least two forms: Follow me and: Come and see. He suggested that these were given voice in the Five Marks of Mission of the Anglican Communion: TELL: to proclaim God’s kingdom; TEACH: to teach, baptize and nurture; TEND: to respond to human need; TRANSFORM: to transform unjust structures; TREASURE: to safeguard creation.
“In the invitation contained in Come and See, we have before us an open–ended invitation to see for ourselves; to cast a critical eye that is open to decision and to commitment to the person of Jesus Christ rather than simply being open to commentating on Jesus Christ and his relevance or irrelevance to our lives and world. This invitation is clustered around the very same Marks of Mission. But it is an open invitation now to two–way traffic; others are to come and see God present and working in the world through who we are, by what we do – to be touched by this divine presence,” he said.
Archbishop Jackson said that the inspiration for the Jerusalem Link, an a–political project, was a photograph in the Irish Times in which a child was standing on the rubble of a block of apartments where his own house, one imagines, once stood.
“Since then we have all seen far far too many similar pictures of lone children on beaches and on piles of rubble, some dead and some alive; similar pictures of fathers carrying the precious bundle of a baby through a war zone that used to be a neighbourhood or a suburb or a community; similar pictures of mothers who have ushered children with manifest physical disabilities across the most unrelenting of terrain to a future which remains perilous but they hope will be different from a past life which has exploded around them. We have seen Aleppo become an even more devastated picture of Gaza with a human person at the heart of every tragedy of violence and internationalism. Incalculable numbers of people are on the move in the cause of their own survival. Incalculable homes and hospitals have been destroyed,” he stated.
Following consultation with people on the ground in our partner dioceses, including the Archbishop of Jerusalem, the decision was taken to raise funds to install solar panels at Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. That target has almost been reached and Archbishop Suheil will be in Dublin and Glendalough and the Archbishop encouraged people to join the many opportunities to meet Archbishop Suheil and talk to him about life for Christians in the Holy Land at the moment.
Archbishop Jackson also highlighted the Dublin and Glendalough 800 Anniversary marking the unification of the two dioceses. This year also marks the 800th anniversary of the Camino from Dublin to Compostela. A range of events will celebrate the diocesan anniversary and will also take up the theme of pilgrimage, he said, initially from Hollywood to Glendalough but also to Compostela and Jerusalem.
The Archbishop suggested three ways of moving forward. Function and Experience, Fruitfulness and Enterprise, and Fellowship and Engagement.
The full text of the Archbishop’s address is below.
Photo captions:
Top – Members of Dublin and Glendalough Diocesan Synods meeting in Temple Carrig School, Greystones.
Bottom – Archbishop Michael Jackson delivering his Synod address.
DUBLIN AND GLENDALOUGH DIOCESAN SYNOD 2016
Address delivered by Archbishop Michael Jackson
… the architecture of grace …
INTRODUCTION
Three times thus far in the year 2016, I have found myself preaching on the passage from 1 Peter (chapter 2.4–10) where the writer speaks powerfully of a living architecture as a description of the people of God and the body of Christ. He talks almost conversationally of the stones being brought to life rather in the way that Ezekiel 37 speaks of the bones being brought to life, as new energy is breathed by the Spirit of God into a tired and traumatized people. The urgency in the NT picture, however, by contrast and by extension, derives from the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. It offers something in addition to revived national religion for this very reason. Its concern stretches beyond a community of shared interest rousing itself from the despond and the rootlessness of Exile; it shows a community of eschatological expectation, a community of new horizons, a community of resurrection and a community pulsating with potential for globalization – all combined with the hope of new life in the Spirit of God that was already to be found in Ezekiel. It is a building that is alive, that is held together by the Risen Christ. It makes its people priests and equips them to be, not simply to attend, the temple. The Spirit of God is now clearly, in the New Testament context, the Spirit of The Christ. This is the fruit and the joy of Incarnation. And for us it is clustered around what can be, and is, a very Irish image: the careful capacity that a builder of a dry–stone–wall, perhaps, shows in ‘architecting’ into a thing of beauty and solidity stones that have the function of strength and protection for others. All of you will have seen such dry–stone–walls from time to time and rightly marvelled at them. Some of you may yourselves build them. They are a wonder to behold.
Conversely, nobody other than an archaeologist might take the imaginative leap to think of stones having a life, telling a story, walking the walk as well as talking the talk. We in the Church of Ireland, however, have no option other than to think in this direction. We have more buildings than we may ever need and still we are called upon to treasure them. We are honour bound and impelled by God to use them positively and creatively for the Kingdom of God, making good and worldly provision for their upkeep, sharing them as places where God’s grace is disclosed, God’s name is praised and God’s people are welcomed: whoever they are, whoever we are. The longer we have custodianship of these buildings, the more gracious and different uses we need for them.
In a wide array of places right across the dioceses, a number of our buildings is used in this way: by us, by those of other Christian traditions, by members of the wider community and by authorized authority and with authorized approval. There will need to be more of this properly authorized shared use of sacred space for us to find new ways of retaining and sharing what we have and who we are. However you read the results of the last internal Church of Ireland Census, the numbers themselves do not read well; and we soon face into another internal Census, in November of this year. While the future may be ours, it will not be ours alone; and it will be ‘ours’ for us to make something of it. Nor was the past ever ‘ours’ alone either. The Centenary Commemorations of 2016 have shown us this in a sustained and fulsome way. This sense of community–dependence was well expressed by Robert Runcie, then archbishop of Canterbury, preaching at the 1988 Lambeth Conference and inviting the congregation of privileged and well–placed international Anglicans to look high above their heads at an arch in the interior of the cathedral. He then uttered the following memorable line: An arch is the sum of two weaknesses. The continuing impact of his words for me today is that compassion and care lie at the heart of the architecture of grace. As we move towards others in need and in gift, there is an exchange of grace: God–given indeed; given to us and shared by us; given by God and shared by others.
DISCIPLESHIP LIKE LEADERSHIP: FROM THE BOTTOM DOWN
You might say: But we are already doing this all the time anyway! My purpose is first and foremost to thank all of you for the many ways in which you seek on a daily basis to integrate who you are as members of the Church of Ireland in the places where you live, in the families to whom you belong, in the communities of whom you are part and in the ways in which you radiate the person of Christ through the person you are. My further point is that, over a timeframe of six years, I have sensed and seen that there are indeed good initiatives taking place which are creative and inspiring; my thanks and appreciation go to all who do and sustain these things, often with quiet grace. Our capacity to share the spirit of discipleship that lies, often unacknowledged, within them is something that I feel we need to keep working on. This is not communication for communication’s sake; this is not information for the sake of information–overload. It is, rather, something twofold. The first is an enigmatic phrase from the most erudite of my predecessors in the twentieth–century, Dr McAdoo, to the following effect: Anglicanism is about becoming who you are. Those of you who knew him and revered him can hear the argument begin to flow from his lips about Anglicanism being organic and about its fulfilment existing already in the catholicity of the church in the fulness of Christ and about the excitement of its disclosure by us in our time, today – he became very fond of the word: today – with an urgency that its truly of Christ and of Christ’s Kingdom.
The second is a plea of my own and although I made it last year, I make it again this year too. It is about communion itself. Communion, conviction and communication hold together in ways that are vital to our self–undestanding as Christian Anglicans and as Anglican Christians. A Federation simply is not the same as a Communion. A federation is a conflation of shared interests clustered around an uneasy truce and a rule book; a communion is a way of being human that connects with and derives from being made in the image and likeness of God. Communion, however intangible, however incomprehensible, however inchoate it may seem, is a pearl of great price. It is to be treasured, not to be rebranded, loosened and thereby voided of its content. Communion connects us and our conviction with the communion that is God the Trinity. Communion moulds us as Christians in the modern world. It was worth it in the ancient world of doctrinal controversy and it is worth it in the contemporary world. No amount of Googling will restore it, if we set it to one side for the sake of expediency or survivalism.
FROM THE BOTTOM DOWN: DISCIPLESHIP AND LEADERSHIP: COME&C
It is for reasons such as this that I am unashamed by talking of both discipleship and leadership as being: from the bottom down. Christianity is a simple response to a simple invitation to be rooted in Jesus Christ – simply. It comes in the Bible in at least two forms: Follow me and: Come and see. Both of these approaches appeal to different parts of our personality. There is, therefore, something for everyone. In the invitation of Follow me, we see Jesus inviting people who work, for example, in a fishing co–operative to seek and to find their existing skills and talents afresh in a new context and in a new world. They are to fish for people like themselves in the world around them: to invest skills and instincts of earth in the work of heaven; to make friends and to respond to their needs through goodness and invitation to discern the Kingdom of God. These are given voice today in the Five Marks of Mission of the Anglican Communion:
TELL: to proclaim God’s kingdom
TEACH: to teach, baptize and nurture
TEND: to respond to human need
TRANSFORM: to transform unjust structures
TREASURE: to safeguard creation.
In the invitation contained in Come and See, we have before us an open–ended invitation to see for ourselves; to cast a critical eye that is open to decision and to commitment to the person of Jesus Christ rather than simply being open to commentating on Jesus Christ and his relevance or irrelevance to our lives and world. This invitation is clustered around the very same Marks of Mission. But it is an open invitation now to two–way traffic; others are to come and see God present and working in the world through who we are, by what we do – to be touched by this divine presence. Again, the formula is simple. If it means something to us to be baptized in Christ; if it matters anything to carry the cross of Christ on our forehead – God wants us to show this Christian self to others. The challenge in the invitation is, as always it will be, for a settled, self–comforting, self–indulgent, self–authenticating church: Is it for us? Is there not somebody else who can do this? Or, in the words of the Athenians when they hear Paul speak of the resurrection on The Areopagus, are too many of us saying: ‘Interesting stuff; somewhat unconvincing. It would be good to hear you again sometime on this topic but please don’t bother us today’?
These two invitations: Follow me and: Come and see taken together help us close the gap between being lost and being found, in other familiar Biblical language. They also help us to take delight in the two–way traffic of giving and receiving; of letting others be Christ to us. It is a humility that is deeply unattractive to those who have a relentless understanding of their own sufficiency, a confused understanding of leadership and a disconnection from service as needing to be the starting–point and the end–point. Seen from a less self–obsessed perspective, however, it is the freedom of being found again by God in the wilderness wanderings of a modern technological world of convenience and alienation, of trafficking and abuse. Companionship, caring, compassion – all of these building–blocks of grace which we all too easily leave other people to care about while we get on with supposedly the real thing – have a sharp edge, and rightly, when we respond in leadership and service to apply them in the spirit of Follow me and Come and See. When we listen to them carefully, they show us that in the Way of Christ there is plenty of scope for our personal insights, our personal contribution and our personal action along with companionship, caring and compassion for others.
Discipleship therefore lies at the heart of Christian life, Christian service, Christian leadership and authorized Christian ministry. All ministry is rooted in a coherent consistency with Bible and Prayer Book in the Church of Ireland tradition. Otherwise it is not authentically Christian. This is a self–evident truth. This recognition constructs, through living stones, lay and ordained life alike and binds all of us together in the expression of our faith in ways that we celebrate. It is important and energizing for us to re–discover our foundations on a regular basis. Not only are we doing this through the Come&C initiaitve but we are also doing it through the Diocesan Link with the Diocese of Jerusalem and the Dublin and Glendalough 800. In regard to all of these I wish to express my thanks, as bishop of the dioceses, to the significant number of people – lay and ordained – who have worked hard and with great joy and givingness on these projects. They are now part of the weave of diocesan life and for those who have not yet engaged directly with them, the invitation remains open. There are plenty of fresh opportunities in the weeks and years ahead.
JERUSALEM
The link with the Diocese of Jerusalem came about directly from a reaction of generosity by people across the United Dioceses, and extending to include many other parts of the Church of Ireland, a reaction to the downward spiral of conditions of human dignity and living in Gaza. This initiative showed the openness of human giving on the part of thousands of people and it is still continuing to this day. It was and remains entirely a–political in character. The initiative was originally inspired by a front cover photograph in a Saturday Irish Times Weekend Magazing where a lone individual – a child – was standing on the rubble of a block of apartments where his own house, one imagines, once stood. Since then we have all seen far far too many similar pictures of lone children on beaches and on piles of rubble, some dead and some alive; similar pictures of fathers carrying the precious bundle of a baby through a war zone that used to be a neighbourhood or a suburb or a community; similar pictures of mothers who have ushered children with manifest physical disabilities across the most unrelenting of terrain to a future which remains perilous but they hope will be different from a past life which has exploded around them. We have seen Aleppo become an even more devastated picture of Gaza with a human person at the heart of every tragedy of violence and internationalism.
Incalculable numbers of people are on the move in the cause of their own survival. Incalculable homes and hospitals have been destroyed. In consultation with the people on the ground and with the archbishop of Jerusalem and with USPG Ireland, the decision was made to raise money for the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City and to install solar panelling. Our hope had been that we might be able to raise this in three blocks of money but we have had to accelerate this gathering of money as the Israeli Government will permit only one importation of the relevant materials and equipment. I am very pleased to say this money has now substantially been raised and also that we will have archbishop Suheil and his chaplain with us in late November for a comprehensive visit to the United Dioceses. There will be a wide range of opportunities for members of the dioceses to meet him and hear the story of him and of his people and I do hope that you will avail of these. He and the people of his diocese describe themsleves as living stones in the sense of discipleship, continuity, witness and presence in one of the most enigmatic parts of today’s world.
DUBLIN AND GLENDALOUGH 800
This came about by a realization that the year 2016 heralds the eight hundredth anniversary of the uniting of Glendalough and Dublin and the inauguration of the Camino from Dublin (St James’s Gate) to Compostela. A group under the chairmanship of Canon McKinley and very ably supported by Ms Caoimhe Leppard set to work speedily and has produced a varied and exciting range of developments and activites that will enable us to mark this significant anniversary. Importantly, within the dioceses there will be a number of enjoyable events involving people of all ages and also taking up the theme of pilgrimage, initially from Holywood to Glendalough and then moving out into both Compostela and Jerusalem as things progress and develop. I realize that this is not for everyone but the connections are there in the lifeblood of our diocese for any to take up and to develop. The prayer at the heart of pilgrimage can be living and salvific for all.
As part of our marking Dublin and Glendalough 800 we have with us this afternoon the Anglican bishops of Spain and of Lusitania. Both are well known to us. We are delighted that Bishop Carlos and Bishop Jose Georges are of our Synods. In a room in The See House hang the portraits of Archbishop Plunket and Archbishop Gregg. Both of these people are intrinsic to the life of these two dioceses. And both, in a very special and joyful way, are understood in these churches as being Founding Fathers as they each contributed strategically and structurally to the creation and the early development of both dioceses. When the Anglicans of Spain wanted to create a diocese in the late nineteenth century, it proved impossible for the Church of England to help them structurally. They were redirected to the nearby and newly disestablished Church of Ireland. Some years later Portugal followed suit. This has without a shadow of doubt been our gain and I am delighted to be able to reciprocate ecclesiastical hospitality as I have had the privilege to be the principal consecrator of Bishop Jose Georges and to be a participant in the Diocesan Synod of Spain under the baton of Bishop Carlos. During the time they are here, they will participate in diocesan life, attend the Diocesan National Schools’ Service, learn about Come&C which both of them want to implement in their respective dioceses and they will also go to St James’s Church to its Pilgrimage Centre and also hear of our plans to develop the Camino of Glendalough. Spanish National Day falls within their time here so they will also meet the Spanish Ambassador. We are delighted to have them here as, in a very real sense like us, children of Dublin and Glendalough. In a very tangible way they tie us in with what it is to be European people, European Anglicans and a European church at a time of great European uncertainty and tension.
THREE WAYS OF MOVING FORWARD
Function and Experience: there are things that we do in any case and often without any specific religious intention and they are good things. My encouragement to each one of you is that you seek God at the heart of all of them, if God is there; and that you enable yourself to awaken to the discipleship that is part of who you are and who you will yet become; and that you connect it with your baptism and enjoy it. As you train yourselves, in thanksgiving and in prayer, to seek God in these seemingly small acts, God will come to find you there. You will be found by God in your lostness. This experience will affirm you as a child of God first and foremost to yourself. It will help you to discover your faith and to be happy in your faith. It will help others to notice the ways of God, as we Christians know God, through involvement in the ways of the world. This includes and requires our meeting people of Other World Faiths as friends and as human equals.
Fruitfulness and Enterprise: seeing the fruits of our commitment and labours is the next stage of this movement. I take you to the passage in The Gospel where the disciples ask Jesus for a prayer. They do not ask him for a FacebookPost or a quotation ‘on the record’ but they ask him for a prayer. They do so because John the Baptizer has given a prayer to his disciples and they want one. But they do so also for reassurance, using a somewhat wistful phrase: Are you the one we were to expect or should we be looking for someone else? There are many ways of reading this question but the way in which I read it is to suggest that they are hoping for fruit for their commitment and fruit of their labours. Jesus remains patient and positive. He points them to the many wonderful acts of mercy and healing, of new ways of seeing things and of understanding the world. It is a world with Christ Jesus at the heart of it. Moving from function to fruitfulness and indeed from experience to enterprise is the second way of finding one’s discipleship.
Fellowship and Engagement: Both of these need connection and this is why earlier I put emphasis on communion. Communion is more about God than it is about anything else. Communion is about connection between God and creation and, through God, across creation itself. Communion is about the humility to accept and to delight in the realization that sharing and giving are more exciting than withholding or withdrawing. And so, in the language of my opening comments, the living stones by God appointed themselves create a community of faith and action, the follow–through of fellowship and engagement. They are now a building that lives and gives life to those who wish to respond and follow. It has never been about perfection – but it has always been about salvation. It has never been about self–promotion – but it has always been about self–giving. It has never been about the negative – but it has always been about the positive.
I wish to thank all who have made these Synods possible: the Honorary Secretaries Lay and Ordained, the Diocesan Secretaries and all other Members of the Diocesan Staff, the Headmaster, pupils and staff of Temple Carrig School and all associated with its origin and its life. Our hope and prayer is that this school will continue to flourish, as the first school of its type to be built since the foundation of The State under Church of Ireland patronage, as indeed that our dioceses will flourish as United Dioceses. I wish to thank all Members of the Diocesan Synods for coming in good numbers and our good friends the bishops of Spain and Lusitania for making the time to make history with us in the 800th year of our being the United Dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough. May we, as living stones by God appointed, remember for good the simplicity of faith and its tangible connection with hope and love (1 Corinthians 13).
+Michael Dublin and Glendalough:
11 October 2016